“Ye are a royal priesthood.”

(I Peter 2:9)

The great American debate that extends from Washington’s congressional halls to the street corners, parlors and Sunday school classrooms of every city and town of our nation today concerns the question of segregation and integration. One of the many unfortunate, regrettable consequences of this time of tension has been the tide of uncertainty, suspicion and fear which has welled up in the hearts of church people over what this controversy is going to do to the church they love. Fears of what church leaders or church councils might force or obligate church members in local congregations to do, fears of what their ministers might require of them, have put many faithful and devoted church people into a panic.

In such a time when all the hurricane warnings are out denoting high-velocity emotional winds, it should be a very heartening, encouraging and calming experience for a Presbyterian gathering on Reformation Day to turn to one of the principle doctrines of their Reformed faith: the priesthood of all believers. For here we can clearly see in firm outline the genuine safeguards and bulwarks of protections from every threat of force or coercion that are ours in such a storm.

In simplest terms, the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers meant, in Reformation times, a return to the democracy of the New Testament Church. This doctrine when actually applied to church affairs took the control of worship, of teaching, of church finance and church government, out of the hands of the clergy and put it into the hands of the people. It restored the church to its rank and file members.

John Oliver Nelson suggests that the change in church architecture after the Reformation illustrates the change which took place in the structure of theology and church government. In the old mediaeval cathedrals the congregation was separated from the clergy by an altar screen. The really religious were the priests, monks, and other ecclesiastical functionaries, put in the chancel apart from the plain people. There, behind and around the altar, “God was praised for the people out front, prayers were said for them, and communion was handed to the people out front. Thus the life of the church, to all intents, went on in the chancel. To this day, where the mediaeval principal holds, the only actual members of the church are the clergy. Laymen are not members of the church; they merely ‘communicate with it.’ When the church speaks it is the voice of the clergy only.” — John Oliver Nelson, Young Layman, Young Church.

But the Reformation did away with all that separation of the religious from the people.  Certainly for Presbyterian Protestants it did, for this principal of the priesthood of all believers was enshrined in our Confession of Faith and Book of Church Order. Instead of a priest standing between people and altar, the minister was one who sat among the people as one who served around a table. Instead of a church made up of clergy, they had a church made up of laymen.

See some of the practical effects of this Reformation doctrine in the lives of people then and on till today in Protestant churches:

First of all, it has revitalized worship and devotion for the common man. The priesthood of all believers proclaims the Biblical truth that every person who trusts and loves Jesus Christ stands in direct relationship with Eternal God. He has no need of an intermediary, a go-between, a saint living or dead, to receive his lowly prayers or confessions and relay them to a righteous God. Because of Christ’s atoning blood every believer may come boldly unto the throne of grace and like a man speak for himself his whole heart, and receive directly from God the salvation and grace he needs.

A second practical effect of the priesthood of all believers is the sanctifying of all vocations. Mediaeval society was stratified. The upper level, the higher life, was for those who took holy orders and as celibate priests, monks, nuns, served God. The lower level, of the earthy, was reserved for those in the worldly pursuits, who married and raised a family. The first was the religious life and the second was secular and between the two a great gulf was fixed.

But then came the Reformation and the Biblical doctrine of the priesthood of all believers was applied to the whole of man’s life — the church and the world — and then it was made clear that as every believer is a priest unto God so is every vocation a holy calling, a sacred vocation, if pursued for the glory of God. The honest merchant who serves his Lord in fair trade and the devoted mother who lays down her life daily for her children are just as holy walks of life as the priest at the altar or the monk kneeling at his prayer bench.

A third practical effect of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers (and it is this which has particular relevance for us in this time of tension, suspicion and fear) is the democratizing of church government. The Reformation tolled the death knell of absolutism. The tyranny of priest and prelate was purged from the Reformed church. No longer could any one man say in Protestantism, as a pope had said in the Roman church, “I am the church.” Church rule and control was returned to the people after the New Testament ideal.

In Presbyterian Constitutional government this meant vesting authority and power in the hands of the elected representatives of the congregation. In a local church the members elect elders, men of piety, judgment and devotion, to rule over them in the Lord. These elected and ordained elders, all laymen, constitute the session of the church. To this body the congregation delegates ecclesiastical power to receive and dismiss members, to order public worship, to maintain a church school, to take pastoral oversight of the congregation; in short, to run the church.

The minister in Presbyterian church government is not a ruler of the church. He exercises no ecclesiastical power. He cannot receive members into or dismiss them from the congregation. His office is simply to preside at session meetings and the elected elders of the congregation in the session have full power in their hands as delegated to them by the members.

Utterly groundless are fears that Presbyterian ministers could or would usurp ecclesiastical authority and oppress the laity, forcing upon them their views and practices. The whole constitutional system of the Presbyterian church stands as a safeguard against this. Besides, who are Presbyterian ministers anyway? Why, they are the very ones who have freely chosen the reformed theology, embraced the reformed doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, and have given their lives to this very business of helping to train and to lead the laity to be the church.

A moving passage in the 20^th chapter of the Book of Acts pictures the Biblical ideal of the relationship that should exist between minister, elders, and congregation. Paul, who had served as pastor of the church at Ephesus for three years, is on his way to Jerusalem. He sends word to the elders at Ephesus to meet him for a conference at the seaport town of Miletus. When they arrive and conference begins, Paul first mentions his role as pastor in that church, how he had lived with them sharing their common life in joys and sorrows, teaching them publicly and from house to house, and as a preacher of the gospel, “declaring unto them the whole counsel of God.”

Then Paul passed on to a consideration of the role of the elders in the church. Their office was more permanent than his in a particular congregation. After three years Paul had moved on to other work. Ministers come and go but the elders remain. Theirs was the responsibility to “take heed to themselves, and to all the flock over which the Holy Spirit had made them overseers, and to feed the flock of God, which He had purchased with His own blood,” on the word of God’s truth. Paul also warned the elders of Ephesus to beware of both the enemies who would arise from without and “the men speaking perverse things” who would arise within to disturb and draw away disciples.

Let no Presbyterian then fear for his rights and freedom in his church. No higher court of the church, no clergyman, will force him on any issue, be it pre-destination, pre-millenarianism, integration, capitalism, or communism. He has as his safeguard the whole Presbyterian system of doctrine and government in which the priesthood of all believers is enshrined.

But there is a fourth and fundamental application of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers which we must never lose sight of — its exalting of Jesus Christ as the undisputed head of His church. James Hastings Nichols, in his Primer for Protestants, points out that while this doctrine of the priesthood of all believers has ordinarily meant “religious emancipation of the individual,” his independence and freedom, the historic doctrine to the reformers meant the “mutual ministry of all believers,” that as every man is his own priest, so is every believer also his neighbor’s priest. Martin Luther put it this way: all believing laymen “are worthy to appear before God, to pray for others, to teach each other mutually the things that are of God … so ought we freely to help our neighbors by our body and works, and each should become to the other a sort of Christ, so that we may be mutually Christ’s, and that the same Christ may be in all of us.”

Certainly, while the Reformers were eagerly insisting upon the New Testament teaching of the priesthood of all believers, they were not doing it just to cast the clergy and the Roman hierarchy out from their dominating role to ensconce the laity in the seat of power, but to restore to the Lord Jesus Christ his rightful authority as the great head of the church.

Listen to John Calvin, the Father of Presbyterianism, as he speaks in the Third Book of his Institutes of the Christian Religion.

“We are not our own: therefore, neither our reason nor our will should predominate in our deliberations and actions.

We are not our own: therefore, let us not presuppose it is our end to seek what may be expedient for us according to the flesh.

We are not our own: therefore, let us, so far as possible, forget ourselves and all things that are ours.

On the contrary, we are God’s: therefore, to Him let us live and die.

We are God’s: therefore, let His wisdom and will preside in all our actions.

“We are God’s; towards Him: therefore, as our only legitimate end, let every part of our lives be directed.”

Yes, we are free. We are not bound to a priesthood or a hierarchy in worship or church government, but let us remember that the church to which we belong is the Church of Jesus Christ. It is not my church. It is not yours. It is Christ’s. His word is to guide us, His will to control us, His spirit to animate us. What does He say in John 15? “I am the vine and ye are the branches. Abide in me and I in you. Apart from me, ye can do nothing.”

If we refuse His spirit, go against His word and His will, our denomination, whatever it may be, it cannot be Christ’s church. If we separate ourselves from Him, then where is our salvation which is by His atonement? Where is our authority which is from His divine sonship? Where is our wisdom which has repudiated the Eternal Word? Where is our vindication of our acts which are not done and dared in His name and His spirit, but in our prejudice and our self-will?

O, let the church be the church. Let the laity claim and exercise their ancient New Testament authority in the church but let them remember who they are and whose they are. Let them seek Christ’s will, let them take counsel from His word. Let them remember that they are a royal priesthood appointed and ordained by Him who has loved us and given Himself for us and made us kings and priests in His own blood unto God and His Father.

And so the role of Christ’s church in this crisis and in all others is to serve the needs of suffering and despairing humanity as God’s agent of redemptive love in salvation and reconciliation, as harbingers of truth, love and sacrifice.

It all comes simply to this — in this priesthood of all believers — who or what shall influence and form our thinking, conversation, and action? Pressure groups, old patterns of accepted social custom, rumor, fear, prejudice, or God’s word and the spirit of the living Christ? If His church does not speak for the Bible, God the Father, and Our Savior Jesus Christ, who will?